Horrible tomato year???

Is anyone else having a horrible tomato year? I have six plants growing in the garden this year and they’re stunted and barely flowering/fruiting. I‘m In SW Ontario, 6B. Is anyone else having a horrible growing year? I also grew corn, and got maybe eight ears in total. We had a crazy amount of rain earlier in the season, but since then it’s just been normal hot summer weather with rain every few days. I barely had to water this year because of the rain every few days. Just my plants just don’t want to grow and fruit this year. A friend from work commented that his tomatoes weren’t growing either. Is anyone else having a rough gardening year?

Comments (13)

It's been a very odd year for tomatoes. We are close enough geographically to have some similarities of season. My plants grew huge, initially setting few fruit but catching up with fruit set later. Most of my varieties, once they set fruit, have been slow to ripen. Plus I have blossom end rot this year, where I never have had it before. Amish Paste, Cello, and Juliet are all doing really well, but nothing else. Even Mortgage Lifter, one of my usual mainstays, is producing small fruit that split. Right now I have plants loaded with green tomatoes that are probably not going to turn before frost, so I will be researching green tomato recipes this fall.

Oh yes I will bring in all the green ones; I am giving them another week or two as we have no frost in the forecast just yet. My green tomatoes are sticking around and ripening very slowly though so I anticipate a lot left by the time it becomes necessary to bring them in. My San Marzanos are sad, tiny fruited, and all have horrible BER.

I am working with new garden beds this spring, we moved last year and the new house did not have a garden. So I have detailed fert plans for next year to avert more BER. I personally find it amusing that after 10 years of never using epsom salts and never having that problem, I used them this spring thinking, "new dirt, it can't hurt to be careful." Hah!!

We recently expanded our operations which involved bringing in 2 yards of bagged soil and 3 yards bulk Purple Cow Organic mulch, which may have had something to do with the results.

For the first time, I added an epsom salts coffee grounds mixture to each plant, and scratched in coffee grounds and Jobe's Organics Vegetable-n-Tomato Granular fert after fruit started setting, also the first time...no problems with BER.

I'm in zone 3b SK and my tomatoes are growing very well. We haven't had much rain. No signs of disease or pests and there is lots of fruit. I use the Florida Weave and have been taking off the lower leaves to provide some air circulation to the plants. One change this year was to install a drip irrigation system for the vegetables and this is the first year I have had zero blossom end rot.

I was way behind so I went and bought two starter plants. They were coming along nicely and had some tomatoes setting and then I made a huge mistake and I sprayed some weeds in the lawn. That put a stop to the growth to my early girl determine plant I had in a bag. It never grew or put out any more flowers The indeterminate big boy I had in my raised bed grew but it had bad leaf curl and all the new flowers dropped of. UGH! What a mistake I made by spraying some weed spray. I usually hand pick the weeds but the clover was being determined not to go away. Every year I learn something else about growing tomatoes. My cucumbers weren’t bothered at all.

Candi, yes, it was a HORRIBLE tomato year here in my part of central Alberta, all it did was RAIN ALL SUMMER LONG and it continues to do so! My 'Defiant' tomatoes are producing about 1/5 th of their normal yield, though the 'Mountain Honey' cherries have gone gangbusters and I'll probably end up harvesting 30 lbs from only four plants! These are kinda thick skinned and crack resistant and taste really good if allowed to fully ripen, will grow them again! Oh, the 'Defiant' I've been planting for years because of their great disease resistance and flavor!

I had 4 in containers in the container garden. 1 each of the 4 kinds growing in the gardens. Testing them out to see how well they do or not in the containers. I had gone away for a long weekend and come home late at night. Woke up and having my coffee looking out at the garden and wondered where the hell my plants went? Ugh, some were so big I could hear them eating what was left of my poor plants. All 4 just never recovered, though the birds were thrilled with the couple dozen drowned ones I pull off the plants over a couple days.

My salad tomato in it's big party tub by the porch, a mere 10 feet away from the container garden- it grew nicely and still is, but just didn't set much blossoms in general. Not a single hornworm on it, despite it's being close to the devoured plants- perhaps all the dill I planted in that tub? Anywho, no matter, it wasn't a terribly tasty tomato for snacking on anyway.

My dwarfs in the raised beds had some critter problems. I'm guessing rabbits or something, because the fruits and foliage at the tops were ok and not nibbled... just the plants are dwarfs and not much was out of range of the nibbling, lol. I didn't lay/spray out hot pepper/garlic/oils as much as I sometimes do when I plant in those beds, and I think that made a difference to critters that don't like hot stuff. Though these beds are about 25 feet away from the garden beds with the storage tomatoes, they didn't get any hornworms- again, got a lot of dill growing there, and bronze fennel nearby.

My storage tomatoes way across the yard from the container tomatoes and party tub by the porch faced the hornworms too, but I caught them in time that the plants bounced back nice even though I did lose a bunch of the early fruit. Not a lot of ripe fruit so far... but a whole lotta green ones on the plants, and fortunately these are meant to be able to be picked green and stored open.

Oddly enough, I didn't see any signs of brachnoid wasps in the hornworms this year, though I kept a sharp eye out for the distinctive "rice" of the eggs on worms as I was pulling them. I leave riced worms alone to help those little wasps along.

Pulled in all the green tomatoes and bagged up the tomato plants this weekend despite still no frost in the forecast, as everything had stopped ripening on the vine and it looked like blight was setting in. Tossed about 1/3 of the tomatoes due to blemishes, splitting etc. Felt guilty when I disturbed a praying mantis and a few bumblebees. Set the mantis gently on the last beans of the season and hoped it would be fine until it laid eggs. It was ready to fight me though. Now I have about 2 bushels of tomatoes to preserve and I'm doing more sauce and looking up recipes for pomodoro verde and green tomato mincemeat.

beesneeds, I also did battle with the hornworms this year, I picked off 30+ the first day, went out a couple of hours later and picked off a couple dozen more. The following day I found as many as I did the first day. That's when I sent my husband to the store for Sevin. (sigh)

As for the worms, they went to the chickens and my girls were very, very happy birds.

The tomatoes are slowly recovering, but those worms managed to just about decimate the tomato patch in those two days.

Annie, BT (bacillus thuringiensis) would be the organic alternative to Sevin, and you could apply it to the leaves BEFORE you see any hornworm damage as they eat the leaves and get poisoned. Maybe an idea for next year?